Brief Encounters

It's 1982, and on television, that means two things: lurid clothes and furnishings and 'Now that's what I call music 1' on the soundtrack.  We're in Sheffield, so 'Full Monty' territory, and what follows is in the mould of those feelgood British staples.  Money is tight, and where it isn't, life is boring, and these circumstances bring together four women who sell Ann Summers sex products at tupperware-style parties.  The local ladies think vibrators are blenders, while the husbands and partners are threatened or bemused by this liberated behaviour.

Challenging?  No.  Forgettable?  Yes, especially as it hasn't obvious expansion room for further series.  Performed (ahem) with gusto by a decent cast, but set to inspire a summer flirtation rather than a full-on holiday romance.

New Blood

We can't help thinking this was made for BBC3 and, now that the channel has gone online, has found an uncomfortable home at 9pm on BBC1.  Writer Anthony Horowitz was responsible for 'Foyle's War', but is best known as a children's author, and he has definitely pitched this at a young and liberal audience.  The heroes are twenty-something, ethnic minority, professional Brits battling evil Big Pharma and the powers that be who have invested in them.  There are weekly stories within a series narrative establishing a buddy-buddy relationship that generally feels like it's based on banter scripted by a middle-aged man, which of-course it is.

As a 7pm BBC3 offering it would pass muster, but the gimmicky filming and the making light of serious issues are a bad fit on the flagship channel at prime time.

The Secret

In 1991, Colin Howell (James Nesbitt) is a Coleraine dentist and family man whose main recreation is a bible study group, until he meets married mother Hazel Buchanan (Genevieve O'Reilly), a local teacher, at the church.  She then becomes his main hobby, because, err, God meant it to happen.  Of-course he did.  That old nonsense about not committing adultery, indeed.  The pair aren't particularly discreet, so it isn't long before their pastor (Jason Watkins) finds out and informs all parties.  Forgiveness follows, and all seems well, but as Howell's wife Lesley gives birth to their fourth child, the affair starts up again.  Knowing his wife is distraught, and Hazel's husband similarly upset, Colin hits on the plan to do them a favour and put them out of their misery, stage-managing a suicide pact, enabling him and Hazel to join their families together.

Too far-fetched for drama, it had to be real.  Howell was convicted in 2010 of double murder, and his former lover was also convicted.  They had long since split up and married other partners, who were both presumably ignorant of their spouses' bloody past.  It's all rather sordid and depressing.  Nesbitt is charismatic as the hypocritical happy-clappy man o'God, but the tale highlights the sorry state of a religion so out of sync with the times that a follower would rather commit murder than be seen to commit a lesser offence. 

Undercover

The success of 'War and Peace' and 'The Night Manager' on BBC1's 9pm Sunday slot has left big shoes to fill.  'Undercover' treads confidently, if a little predictably, in its opener.  A juggernaut narrowly misses crushing Maya (Sophie Okonedo) within the first few minutes (she was fumbling for her phone on a desert highway, as you do).  She's a lawyer, fighting for client Rudy (Dennis Haysbert)  facing execution on Death Row.  We don't quite know what he's done, but Maya likes him and he's played by the cuddly President in '24', so we feel he has to have been unjustly sentenced.  Maya lives in London and is happily married to Nick (Adrian Lester) with three teenaged children, one of whom is autistic, but Nicky has a secret that threatens to expose the basis of their relationship as a lie....

Good so far.  Just enough hints and flashbacks to keep us guessing what happened, why and to whom in 1996.  This clearly takes its cue from the recent, controversial court cases involving long-term undercover cops who engaged in relationships with those they were investigating, even in some cases having children from those relationships, in addition to ongoing relationships under their own names.  We hope it holds its nerve and becomes an outstanding drama, since it is tackling such major themes as justice, prejudice, public and personal trust and betrayal in the modern democratic state.

The Durrells

Seemingly as long as there is British Television there will be new adaptations of Gerald Durrell's Corfu novels, particularly 'My Family and Other Animals'.  Five minutes (OK, a few years) after the last one, along comes another on ITV, with charmingly illustrated credits and a new generation of child actors .  Keeley Hawes plays put-upon Mrs. D, who decides to end her dreary suburban penury in favour of eking out an existence with her four unruly children in sunny Corfu.  Thanks to the book and all the previous versions, we mostly know what happens next, but there's no reason newcomers to the tale shouldn't enjoy this adaptation.  That is, unless they are pedants and wonder what on earth young Margo (Daisy Waterstone) is doing sunbathing in a bikini in 1935.

Maigret

Rowan Atkinson assumes the mantel of Simenon's pipe-smoking French detective in ITV's new adaptation - the first of two - shown on Easter Monday.  Atkinson wisely underplays the Inspector, but we found it hard to put Mr Bean and various Edmund Blackadders thoroughly behind us.  All credit to him for those lasting creations, but it hindered our immersion in the lively, rather seedy Montmartre of the 1950s.

This story concerned that modern crime drama staple, the serial killer, and naturally the victims are women who happen to be out alone late at night.  Maigret's team are stricken at their inability to catch the culprit, and threatened with being taken off the case, until the great man comes up with a daring ruse to smoke out the killer.  Will it work, or go horribly wrong...?

An oddity, is all we can say.  Ponderously slow except for a chase which feels like it was crowbarred into the midst of proceedings to liven things up.  Most of it looked expensive, but the chase appeared to have been filmed on a camcorder.  Maybe it's the nature of its dated source material, but the dialogue was as stilted as if it had been lifted directly from the French, and the interior scenes had the staged feel of a forgotten drawing-room play. A waste of a very good cast and some lovely couture.

Blue Eyes

More 4's latest Friday foreign drama takes up where 'Spin' left off.  Paris is replaced by Stockholm but the skullduggery, betrayal and downright dirty politics are all present and (in)correct.  Disgraced former Chief of Staff Elin (Louise Peterhoff) is waitressing when she is re-recruited.  The previous occupant has supposedly gone on sick leave but we know that Sarah was tailed and that her abandoned car is in the woods.  She was last seen pleading with Annika, a middle-aged mum who supports the far right.  When Annika is threatened, things start to look conspiratorial.  And intriguing.  And generally like a timely and engrossing drama.  Hurrah.

The A Word

Joe is five, and spends most of his time belting out his dad's favourite music while listening to the songs on his headphones.  He doesn't get invited to his classmates' parties.  His mum and dad reluctantly consult doctors as to whether their son is somewhere on the spectrum of the 'A' word.

We seem to recall a similarly-themed one-off drama on ITV a few years ago with Keeley Hawes and Ben Miles as worried parents of a young boy.  As there, the wider family get involved (the boy's brewer uncle and his adulterous doctor wife, the un-pc granddad played by a surely-too-young Christopher Eccleston) and there's clearly a rocky road ahead.  It's watchable, has great performances and beautiful Cumbrian scenery, but at the moment it feels a little by-numbers and predictable.  It's true we've been spoiled with the likes of the second series of 'Happy Valley' - better than the first - and the upcoming third series of 'Line of Duty', but we're not yet sure what this will have to offer to offer above and beyond another exploration of autism.

Follow the Money

The latest Saturday night Scandi offering from BBC4 is 'Follow the Money', which is less a noir than a conspiracy thriller.  The Corporates Dun Bad again, and this being the 21st Century and Denmark, the Bad Corporates are in supposedly sustainable, clean, renewable, green energy.  The adjectives may seem superfluous, but apparently they don't all mean the same thing, and they are anything but clean in the hands of Sanders, whose company Energreen has a wind turbine empire staffed by itinerant workers too scared to refuse to work in unsafe conditions. 

Meanwhile nice cop Mads is on the case of one of them who turns up dead, and his efforts to convince his father to talk result in the father's death too.  Luckily, a colleague in the fraud squad turns up to rescue him from the gloom and guilt - and the similar feelings engendered by his wife's MS - and they embark on an investigation which encompasses Sanders' ambitious new head lawyer and, we suspect, will eventually engulf the mechanics with criminal sidelines.

This is shaping up well, albeit not along unexpected lines.  We're hoping for some moral grey areas writ large over the next month.

Vinyl

Vinyl is the new glossy HBO series about the music industry in New York in the 1970s, produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and currently showing in the UK on Sky Atlantic.

The 1970s was a very interesting time in music.  You had the big beasts like Led Zeppelin and The Eagles still selling shed loads, you had lots of classic pop, big disco hits and the nascent twin forces of punk and hip hop starting to bubble up. 

You'd think that Jagger and Scorsese, having lived through and been involved in this era would know a good few stories and be able to bring this to life (just change the names and some details and it's not libelous...), but apparently not, and this is sadly pretty dull as a result.

Characters seem pretty much straight out of central casting, with a drug-taking maverick as the record company boss, a pretty secretary trying to break through the glass ceiling, rock stars sleeping with groupies and so on.  'Real people' appear in each episode - Robert Plant, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper - but they're more an annoying wink at the camera than there for any reason.  Scorsese's brought some of his tropes to the party - an accidental murder, gangsters and so on, and Jagger's brought his son James, who plays the leader of the punk band, but seems much too well-fed and clean to be authentic. 

We'll keep watching as it's now half way through, but if there is a second series can it be closer to what we all hoped it would be like?

Churchill's Secret

'Elderly man isn't all that well' isn't really a revelation, but when the man in question is Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Michael Gambon), symbol of British Bull-doggedness in WWII, the news is not to be bandied about.  Loyal members of his cabinet want the PM's stroke kept under wraps, lest there's an unseemly scramble for power in the absence of both Churchill and likely successor Anthony Eden (Alex Jennings), who was having gall bladder surgery abroad.  Mrs. Churchill, the redoubtable-in-her-own-right Clementine (Lindsay Duncan), wants Winston away from the temptations of Westminster and brings him back home to the Kent countryside home of Chartwell.  To nurse him, they contract Nurse Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) but their peace is short-lived when the in-fighting Tories - plus ca change! - and the equally quarrelsome younger Churchills flock to Winston's bedside.

One of those 'rather nice' dramas that will go down well in America, this is a bit of a curio.  The storyline runs in a similar way to 'The Madness of George III': statesman brought low, struggles of his family and the succession, slow recovery, lessons learned etc.  It's beautifully filmed, some of it at Chartwell itself, now a National Trust gem, and is directed solidly by Charles Sturridge.  Overall though, it's rather a byway in the great man's life, and not that one that really altered the course of his remaining decade or so.  The addition of a fictional character to nurse him, who of-course happens to be from a Labour family, seems an unnecessary addition to proceedings, and merely a cypher in whom Clemmie can confide about the grief of losing her young daughter Marigold some thirty years earlier.  Things only really spring to life when the children arrive and, facing their father's death, are candid about the drawbacks of growing up with parents who were almost always otherwise engaged.

Trapped

Extreme Scandi alert!  Danish heavyweights be warned - the Icelanders are on the case.  Sharp-eyed viewers may recognise the ship's captain from both 'The Killing' and 'Borgen' but you know Iceland must be small if Denmark embodies the big, bad, criminal nation.

The latest in the BBC4 foreign drama slot is no advertisement for the cold little country, however.  Not only does a dismembered torso turn up in some fishing nets (check your fish finger sandwich very carefully) at the same time as a Lithuanian trafficker who bears an uncanny resemblance to Rasputin, but the kind of storm is blowing which has even the hardly Icelanders looking doubtfully at their snow chains and opting for a cuppa.  Grumpy bear of a policeman Andri (Olafur Darri Olafsson) is called in, and in the best tradition of crime dramas, he has a troubled private life to think about, with his estranged wife showing up for the weekend with a new boyfriend.

The title presumably refers to everyone being trapped in the small coastal town - even the pathology team are trapped in comparatively comfy Reykjavik - so if claustrophobia is your thing, you can wallow in ten episodes shown in five parts.  Sort of like a very long drawn out Agatha Christie.  It manages to keep up the tension over the first two episodes, but not without some TWNHs on the way.  Would a prisoner be allowed out of the cell to go to the toilet, with only one guard?  Wouldn't there be facilities in the cell, or two on duty?  No prizes for guessing what ensues....  And would the children run off in a snowstorm when it's dark and the weather is so bad they can't see a yard in front of them?  It all feels a little contrived to drag the thing out.

Deadline Gallipoli

The cinema seems to be producing lengthy epics at the moment, and right on trend arrives 'Deadline Gallipoli' to the small screen.  We're served this in two great dollops of two hours over a weekend - including the Drama channel's ad breaks - and this is something of a fresh take on WWI in that we in the UK don't see all that much about the Dardanelles campaign, nor from the perspective of the war correspondents.

The slaughter that took place among the outer edges of the crumbling Ottoman Empire saw nearly 400,000 Allied casualties in less than nine months and almost cost one Winston Churchill his career.  While the subject is interesting, however, the production is rather on the nose.  We have the usual stereotypes of effete English dilettantes, upper-class brutes of officers and the odd dedicated war correspondent from England and Australia whose growing awareness of the horrifying realities of mechanised warfare is at odds with the censorship of the press by the government back home.  Morale must be kept up, and women must continue to be empty-headed unless the silly things decide to take up nursing.  We wanted to like this and there were some good scenes but the endless wordy scenes were unenlivened by good dialogue as they laboured to make the points, which are, of-course, the same as those made by most other WWI dramas regardless of the geographical field of conflict.  In a word, sadly: dull.

Spin

One of the current 'Walter Presents' picks of foreign-language television on the 4 family, this six-parter is pretty timely in the wake of the 2015 attacks in Paris.  The President is assassinated but no-one claims responsibility.  As always in a power vacuum, various ministers jostle for power, by fair means or foul, and one of their main assets is the modern spin doctor.  At the emotional heart are a pair of these sharp operators, Simon Kapita (Bruno Walkowitz) and Ludovic Desmeuze (Gregory Fitoussi), old friends but divided by their current jobs supporting opposing candidates for power.  Fitoussi will be familiar to British viewers from 'Spiral', 'Mr. Selfridge' and 'Odyssey'.

This is the sort of thing that can be slick to the point of superficiality, and it keeps up the pace with various skullduggeries and deals going on, but Walkowitz makes a sympathetically human agent for truth in the treacherous world around him.  This looks set to tackle sexism and racism, not to mention the deep unpleasantness at the heart of the democratic establishment, head on.

Deutschland 83

A series with German subtitles seems a curious choice for going head-to-head with 'War and Peace' on BBC1 and ITV's warhorse 'Endeavour' (where tonight's plot is a riff on 'The Great Gatsby' which seems less ingenious than plagiarist).  This is a rite-of-passage as well as a spy drama, in which young and ardent East German border guard Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) is recruited by his fanatical aunt Leonora (Maria Schrader) to go undercover as a top military aide in Bonn.  Stranger things probably happened, but the premise feels like a tall tale, since the 24-year-old is virtually blackmailed into his spy role and trained in just 3 weeks, then let loose in the decadent, capitalist West.

Rauch, under his alias Moritz Stamm, proves rather an inept spy and we're guessing that in future episodes he gets disillusioned and begins to question the world and his place in it.  The tone is a little uneven, with similarities to the unreal atmosphere of 'The Americans', and there's painstaking musical scene-setting, but whatever your moral stance on Soviet power, Ronald Reagan and European capitalism post-90, this is an interestingly different take on Germany's recent past.

Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands

Sometimes it's easier than others to write an objective review.  We admit that, faced with a host of CGI monsters and dragons generic enough to have appeared in many another fantasy drama, it's difficult.  The problem is that, devoid of an affinity to beasts of this sort, the fantasy tropes, or - to put it unkindly - the similarities between all the stories, render it difficult to tell them apart.

So is this good fantasy or bad fantasy?    Well it's more enjoyable froth, if you like fantasy.  One thing it isn't is 'Beowulf', as in the early Middle-English poem/story.  As is currently common, it takes the classic as some very basic source material and weaves a new bunch of episodes around it.  One thing it is, therefore, is similar to most other tales.  Old warrior is waning, so young(ish) warrior prepares to assume power and undertakes a journey, but there are rivals to his claim etc. etc.  It's at 7pm, so the younger kids should be in bed and the adults not yet on the sofa.  We'd suggest it's not going to convert any dragon-haters, but should please dragon-lovers well enough.

Just have to say that Joanne Whalley looks great (and not mucked about with surgically, praise be).  If nothing else, fantasy does at least have strong roles for mature actresses that don't require them to look either underage or like someone's great-grandmother.

The Frankenstein Chronicles

A similar concept to the current retake on 'Jekyll', this is a chase around after the jolly scientist who stitches body parts together and reanimates them, only shown later and, rather bafflingly, on ITV Encore.  More names than you can shake a stick at here, with Sean Bean playing decent, syphilitic river cop John Marlott, who senses that something other than macabre needlework is going on.  The course of his investigation leads him to body-dealing hospital porter Pritty (Charlie Creed-Miles), his big boss Peel (Tom Ward, here exchanging his pathologist's apron with Samuel West), patrician politicians (Elliot Cowan and Ed Stoppard) and even authors William Blake (Steven Berkoff) and Frankenstein's own creator Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell-Martin).  Oh and let's not forget the magnificent carcass of a pig that he throws into the Thames to test the tides.

This was quite fun and focused less on the gore and shocks of 'Jekyll' than the lacks and longings that would lead someone in early Industrial England to create a composite creature out of dead children.  Marlott has his own Big Sadness that he carries around with him and that we know will be exacerbated by both his mercury pills and his determination to find the truth behind the strange goings-on.  Bean is likeable in the lead role, almost a worn-down, less celebrated version of his Sharpe character grown older.  Why Encore, though, when an ITV audience would enjoy this in a 9pm slot?

London Spy

Honestly, you wait years for Mr Whishaw to appear in a spy drama and two come along at once.  He's currently reprising his role as Q in cinema's latest Bond film, and here he is as a far less geeky Danny, a vulnerable young man in London working in an Amazon-style warehouse.  After a chance meeting, he falls in love with Alex, a mysterious and inhibited young man who says he works for an investment bank, but just as they begin to envisage a future together, Alex disappears.

Exquisite and painful.  The cast, including Jim Broadbent as Danny's friend Scottie, don't put a foot wrong.  It doesn't appear, from this episode, that the homosexuality is a theme at all; these are two young men in love, one of whom has an impossible secret.  It's left to Scottie, a Whitehall mandarin with secrets of his own, to suggest that the man the police are calling Alastair worked for MI6.  By this time, Danny has made a gruesome discovery of his own, that has similarities to the real-life case of the man found in a holdall.  As gripping for its heartfelt portrayal of love as for its murky depiction of espionage, we genuinely can't wait to see what Danny finds out.

Cuffs

That's 'cuffs' as in the hand-locking variety rather than the ends of sleeves or a playful swipe to the side of the head.  A drama about either of the latter might seem to offer less possibilities, but at least they'd have lacked the cliches.  Think 'The Bill' or 'Holby Blue', 'Mersey Beat'... or any of a host of MoR cop shows.  In fact, it's probably easiest to sum up the episode with a sequence of cliches.

1: it's the rookie PC's first day
2: he's the son of the Chief Super (would they really be based at the same station?)
3: he's gay, and gets hit on by an unlikely woman and the male duty solicitor
4. he's paired with a tough, no-nonsense old-timer (Ashley Walters)
5. he makes a couple of serious mistakes but redeems himself by the end of the episode
6. his canteen lunch arrives just as they get a 'shout'
6. his dad has had a fling with a detective sergeant in the station (Amanda Abbington)
7. the aforementioned detective sergeant lives with a dog, to whom she's devoted, and eats microwave dinners
8. the mention of a racist released from prison is immediately followed by said racist attacking a victim
9. a stinger track fails to catch a getaway van but unexpectedly stops a man abducting his daughter
10. the rookie's mentor is proved wrong by the rookie when a vulnerable man hangs himself
11. no-one waits for backup, neatly explained by government cuts

Brighton hasn't featured in a good drama since Peter Mullan developed dementia and lost his criminal empire in 'The Fear', but there was little to enjoy in this beyond shots of the wheel, the piers, the marina, the Lanes and... the A27.  The writer Julie Gearey did superior work in 'Prisoners' Wives' and the main cast, other than newcomer Jacob Ifan as PC Jake Vickers, have all been far better elsewhere.  

Jekyll & Hyde

Jekyll & Hyde, ITV's new Sunday teatime drama, is lots of fun.  Written by Charlie Higson, most famous for The Fast Show, but also the writer of several gruesome thrillers for grown ups (King of the Ants), and kids (the Young Bond books), it's very pointedly not an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but a new spin-off, following the life of his grandson, Robert Jekyll.

It's almost like a Alan Moore graphic novel re-imagining of the story, set in the 1930s with Robert trying to find out about his past, and battling his urges to change from his normal, mild-mannered self to the demonic Hyde.  It also brings to mind 'The Incredible Hulk', with the first transformation coming about when he needs to lift a truck off a small child.  (Thankfully he doesn't inflate and his clothes stay on).  Higson has also thrown a bit of medicine in there, with Jekyll needing to keep taking his pills to keep the attacks at bay.  It's not really much of a spoiler to say that he loses the pills pretty early on.

It's very entertaining, with some great performances particularly from Tom Bateman as Jekyll, and Richard E Grant hamming it up as the baddie Sir Roger Bulstrode, head of a murky organisation investigating the paranormal in 1930s London (we said it was a bit Alan Moore).  It has been criticised for being too scary for the 6.30pm slot, and maybe it is - the bit where intruders enter Jekyll's parents' house was genuinely unsettling - but we remember being terrified by Doctor Who when we were, ahem, somewhat smaller, and he is currently on show pre-watershed on BBC1.

Some bits don't work.  The very brief explanation of Jekyll's ancestry: Stevenson's Hyde had an illegitimate son, who met Jekyll's adopted father in the First World War, having fathered a child himself, which he then abandoned) is a bit convoluted and doesn't explain why Jekyll is called Jekyll, but let's not think about that too much.